WereKitten on 23 April 2009
| CrashMan said: You can convert them to other formats. Is it also fair for someone's IP to be freely distributed (and a file format IS IP) simply because other people want to use it on something other than windows? People have the option NOT to use Windows and therefore you can't use WMV formats natively. Just like if you opt NOT to buy a Wii, you can't (legally) play Super Mario Galaxy. They have every right to protect their IPs and leverage them to gain market share and make a profit. |
Incidentally, this is false. A clean-room reverse-engineered software or hardware emulator is perfectly legal.
In the same way, the Samba guys reverse-engineered MS's SMB network protocol in a perfectly legal way.
As to their IPs, they can leverage them alright. It's just that they are doing a disservice to the users, so much that many States started to request open standards for files of public interest, thus excluding .doc files and moving towards the OpenOffice XML standard. Which in turn caused MS to start the transition to their new OOXML file format and the following ISO fiasco (google for it).
